Posted 2 years ago on June 7, 2013, 11:44 a.m. EST by therising
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Supreme Court OK's DNA swabs of people arrested but not convicted. Drones killing American Citizens without a trial. NSA reviewing all Americans email, phone calls, web searches etc. http://occupywallst.org/forum/3-articles-from-the-last-24-hours-that-every-ameri/ Congress at 5% approval rating. Is the dam of America about to break in a good way? What can we do about the surveillance state? What can we do about 7 corporations owning all the world's media outlets? What can we do about a political system that's bought and paid for by corporations?

If you're impatient, read these two items and then come back and read the rest of this post.

Well, there are obviously hundreds of things we (the collective we) could do. A few examples to start:

anyone who gets all this who is in a position to run for office can make a heck of a lot of noise even if they lose -- I don't care how conservative the district, you have a megaphone. And if this "real" person somehow wins (unlikely but possible), they can make even more noise while in office -- because they got elected without special interest $. It can happen. I'm not betting the whole revolution on it but certainly one component in the larger arsenal.

And those who get this who are not in a position to run for office can make a hell of a lot of noise too. One might think these are small things but they add up (every hammer blow at the dam holding back the water helps:

** GROUP ONE - the easy stuff that still makes a difference:
A). Citizens can write, call & visit their members of house and senate
B). Citizens can write letters to the editor
C). Citizens can vote with their wallets and stop buying from corporations that are corrupting the system, stealing our freedoms or harming our environment
D). There are all sorts of organizations that are truly in the struggle that citizens can support with their time, energy or $.

** GROUP TWO - the harder stuff where more risk is involved but greater progress is made

We can organize our own groups and participate in all forms of nonviolent resistance (always nonviolent) and civil disobedience. One could insert the entire range of Gene Sharp's, Gandhi's and Martin King's tactics here.

I think it helps to have people pushing from the inside and the outside. That's how the walls will eventually come tumbling down.

Everything I've mentioned above is admittedly only enough to start the ball rolling. But momentum is a powerful thing. Once you're rolling, movements have a way of picking up speed.

I, as you may recall, would like to see hundreds of thousands of us / millions of us surround congress and block entrances. Please see two links here:

I would like us to "take our country back" from the banks and their political puppets the way the citizens of Iceland did. All NON-violent. There is much that could come of such an uprising, but a hundred or a thousand checkboxes would need to be checked off before such an effort could come together.

I don't claim that the list above is enough. Just some examples of beginnings of the rumbling that eventually brings the dam down and releases the massive amount of water that's been building for a long long time.

The surveillance state can't hold that water back forever.

I chuckle when some in the general public think Occupy movement somehow ended. The communications and coalitions that have been built and are being built since the fall of 2011 are like nothing that's ever been seen in America. One might loosely say that 2011-2012 was wave one -- an amazingly strong first wave. People have no idea what that accomplished in terms of building revolutionary "infrastructure" and momentum.

Admittedly, many were already in the trenches long before. I'm well aware of that. And they laid the groundwork for these new waves.

I'm excited for the future because I believe that the foundation of this house of cards is terribly unstable -- the beams are hollowed out by termites. And no matter how mighty the house seems now, a good gust could bring the whole thing down. What it's replaced with is obviously the elephant in the room here. I haven't studied enough on that but am intrigued by the possibilities I've read about on this site and elsewhere.

As the great James Baldwin once wrote in "No Name in the Street":

"The representatives of the status quo are sickened and divided, and dread looking into the eyes of their young; while the excluded begin to realize, having endured everything, that they CAN endure everything. They do not know the precise shape of their future, but they know that the future belongs to them. They realize this -- paradoxically -- by the failure of moral energy of their oppressors and begin, almost instinctively, to forge a new morality, to create the principles on which a new world will be built."